J. D. Salinger

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

ahh. i worked 5 miles up the road from him (i really did) and would try to "talk" to him through stories or columns. i had to cover games in cornish and would stop by the 12% Solution, a tiny (uber tiny) general store at the bend of route 12A and the road that carves into cornish proper. everytime i talked up the cutie pie clerk (she really was) to see if JD had been in recently. word was that he'd frequent the place every so often. a freelance columnist (a story unto himself) went to elementary school with his daughter so i tried to get to JD thru the columnist. no go.